


Your Shadow

by singlouder (kobrameme)



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Angst, Kobra uses they/them pronouns fight me, Multi, adding more tags as the story goes on, hard wishful thinking, they're not dead! everything is fine!, welcome to rarepair hell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 03:57:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10845987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kobrameme/pseuds/singlouder
Summary: "They say the zones are haunted. What they don't tell you is that the ghosts are alive."The Killjoys, burned but breathing, wake up and drive away, but you can never really leave Battery City, can you?





	Your Shadow

The first thing Kobra noticed was how disgustingly bright it was on the other side of their eyelids, and they had wordless thoughts about how Ghoul must’ve turned the blinds in their room the wrong way again before their mind hitched on one of the nonwords and their eyes jerked open.

They were on the floor. The burnt part of their leg was also on the floor, and Kobra could feel the bright, almost-sweet pain all over the lower half of their body. There was pain in the upper half, too, but Kobra could clearly identify the neat little circle where that pain in particular started. The burn on their chest really wasn’t that far from their heart. Lucky.

Kobra made a list of all the other things that were on the floor, which included their raygun (good), at least three Dracs (very good), a whole lot of broken glass (probably not good), and Ghoul (really not good). It did not include Party (really, really not good) or Jet (unclear, ask again later). Kobra made the educated decision to deal with the most immediately relevant problem first and started army-crawling over to Ghoul, keeping their chest up, letting their right leg drag like a wet rope.

“Ghoul?” Kobra muttered. They put their fingers in front of Ghoul’s mouth.

Weak breath.

They put their fingers on the underside of Ghoul’s jaw.

Strong pulse.

“Ghoul.” Kobra nudged Ghoul’s shoulder. There were little bits of glass around him, but most of it was outside the doors. “Babe. Ghoulie. Please?”

Ghoul’s left hand twitched–and oh fuck, Ghoul’s hand was burned and the tattoos there were going to be mangled, he was going to be fucking pissed when, when, he woke up–but that was all the reaction Kobra got. Still, it was something that meant that, yes, Ghoul was still alive. Kobra took the time to rest their face against Ghoul’s head, feeling his hair against their lips, while they thought of their next move.

They could see the double glass doors better from this angle. One of them had holes in it where the lasers had hit the glass and melted it into oddly-shaped drips; the other was no longer in its frame, instead lying in hundreds of little shards on the pavement just outside. The Widow was still parked out front, and a pair of dark legs was dangling over the hood, which meant Jet hadn’t made a grand escape with the Girl after all. Kobra deliberately did not think about the Girl. She, at least, they wanted alive.

“Jet,” Kobra croaked like their voice would make it outside. “Jet. C’mon, I can’t…can’t lift Ghoul. Jet.” When there was no response, Kobra did the only thing they could think of and threw their gun at Jet’s legs. They had a shit arm even when they weren’t lying on the floor with at least a second-degree burn on their chest. The gun hit the Widow’s front tire and bounced off, skittering across the ground. Kobra tried throwing Ghoul’s gun, too, because fuck it, and that one hit Jet’s boot, but now they were out of things to throw. “Jet, please, I can’t be the only one awake here, fuck.”

Kobra felt tears coming, tears they were surprised hadn’t rendered them incapable of fighting the instant they saw Korse with that white gun up against Party’s jaw, and they burrowed their face into Ghoul’s shoulder because they weren’t going to cry onto the floor. Then, because real life had started operating largely with movie timing when they left the City, someone said from outside, “Kobes?”  
“Here,” Kobra said unnecessarily. They didn’t move their face, but they knew how Jet Star walked, the sound of his boots scuffing against each other. “Help Ghoul.”

“Thank fuck you’re alive.” Jet crunched through the glass and put one of his hands on the back of Kobra’s head. “Is he?”

“Has a pulse,” Kobra said, because saying alive felt like jinxing it. “Unconscious. Can you–”

“Yeah, I can lift him if you can move.” Jet spat on the ground. “At least they got us all in the fucking front. I took one in the ribs. Hurts to breathe.”

“Leg, by the knee. And chest. The Girl?”

“Chimp drove up with D and Pony just before I blacked out. Guess word got out about the run.”

Kobra didn’t think about how Party had been so insistent on no one else getting involved, how no one else was going to die for them, even if he didn’t say anything about dying because dying wasn’t something Killjoys did. Kobra slid away from Ghoul’s side and took note of Jet’s face. He, too, seemed to be not thinking about it in the same way, like he could see the whole shore and pretend there wasn’t a lake.

Ghoul’s arm, the one with the unburned hand, lolled over the side of his body when Jet lifted him. Kobra felt like an ice cube had dropped into their gut when the back door of the Widow opened and closed.

“Can you sit up?” Jet put one hand on Kobra’s shoulder, and that was when they realized they had been staring at the place where the road up to the headquarters turned, that their vision had been blurry. They blinked hard and rolled themselves over. There was a bit of glass under their thighs. They got almost all the way into a crouch, but they couldn’t bend their right leg without bursting right back into tears. Jet just offered a hand and pulled Kobra upright, even though his face was contorted, too.

Kobra leaned on Jet’s side, grounded by the weight of Jet’s arm around their shoulders. “Party,” they said, because that was the next problem that demanded to be solved. “Where’s Party?”  
Kobra couldn’t see Jet’s face, but that was good. “I don’t know.”

“I thought you might have seen.”

“No. It was all I could do to get out the fucking door. Ghoul–”

“Held them back?” Kobra closed their eyes.

“Yeah. Fucking hero.” They reached the Widow. Jet let Kobra collapse against the hood and take a breather while he picked up the two guns from the ground.

“Where do you think they took him?” Kobra asked. They kicked a piece of glass, sent it skittering down the road.

“I don’t exactly have a map of the place.” Jet paused and looked up at the space where stars should be. “Is it–”

“It’s worth looking.” Kobra exhaled. “If nothing else, we try. We maybe find something to bury.”

“Kobes, I’m the only one who can move right now.”

“Don’t.” Kobra tested their leg. When they leaned on it, their vision went fuzzy, but only for a moment. “I’d expect this from Ghoul, maybe, not you, knowing how you–”

“I thought all of you were dead.” Jet smacked the top of the Widow with an open palm. “I don’t want to make it true.”

“Party would go back for us,” Kobra hissed, and that made Jet stop, nod, and look back up at the dull sky.

“If Ghoul wakes up soon, we all go.” Jet emptied his lungs into the warm air like he thought it would make fog. “We shouldn’t split up.”

Kobra nodded. They shifted their weight onto their bad leg until it didn’t feel like they were going to collapse anymore, then shuffled back into the building. Jet handed them their raygun and, between the two of them, they made damn sure that all of the downed Dracs (five, there were five) weren’t going to get back up. It made Kobra sick, killing them while they were down, but sometimes, Party always said, you did what you needed to do to survive.

Kobra was leaning against a wall, staring at one of the flickering overhead lights and not at Jet draining the rest of his battery into a Drac’s chest, when something outside thumped.

Kobra pointed their gun around the corner before their head. There was nothing out there, just the Widow and too many buildings. They thought it might have been a distant bomb before they heard someone howl and saw the dusty footprint on the inside of the Widow’s back window.

“Ghoul,” they breathed, and they were already outside and trying to yank the door open before Jet finished saying whatever the hell he was trying to say.

The Widow’s back door was locked, which was probably Jet’s idea. Ghoul wasn’t lying there like a rag doll anymore. He had propped himself up on one of his elbows and had his face turned to the stained fabric of the back seat, his injured hand resting against his lap in a tight fist. Kobra watched him shudder, torn with the urge not to interrupt.

They tapped on the glass. Ghoul whirled, reaching for his gun, and then his face switched from terror to relief. He leaned forward and Kobra could see him mouth their name.

“Oh thank fuck,” Kobra whispered. They dropped their head to the glass.

“Kobra?” Ghoul said from inside the car, this time putting some actual sound into it. He pressed one hand to the glass like it might break.

Kobra nodded and lay their hand on top of Ghoul’s. “Yeah, Ghoulie, yeah.”

“I thought you were dead.”

Kobra barked out a single note that might have been a laugh or a sob. They couldn’t tell you. “So did I.”

“I thought you were dead, baby,” Ghoul repeated, trying to open the back door from the inside. It wouldn’t budge. “I thought–”

“I know.” Kobra let their eyes fall shut. “I know, I thought you might not make it either, but I’m right here, I’m–”

Ghoul whimpered. “Babe, it hurts.”

“Of course it does.” And Kobra was back to needing to handle things. The first aid kit was in the trunk, but if they were being honest, Ghoul knew how to patch a burn better than anyone who wasn’t Party. “Jet, can you unlock the car?”

Kobra had known Jet was there, letting them have their moment in peace. He smelled like burnt air. “I thought you had the keys, Kobra.”

“Why the fuck would I have the keys?”

Jet sighed the sigh that invariably meant _I’ve made a mistake_. “Are they in the car.”

“…Jet.”

“I know!”

Kobra sighed and pointed at the front seat, where the keys–not just for the car, for all of the rooms in the hotel safehouse and for the Diner with its various lockboxes and for things Kobra didn’t even know about–were sitting there on the weird velvety fabric like it was a normal fucking day, because Jet seriously did this all the time. It took Ghoul a while to notice Kobra’s gestures, because his eyes were bloodshot and salty, but eventually, he reached into the front seat with a grimace and unlocked the doors.

The next few minutes didn’t stick very well in Kobra’s memory. They remembered Ghoul sitting in their lap, rubbing burn cream on his shoulder, asking whether or not Jet had taken the masks because they deserved to go to the Witch, everyone deserved to go to the Witch in the end. They remembered Jet needing to take scissors to their good jeans just above the knee because they refused to peel their pants off in a BLI parking lot. They remembered a Drac in a mask coming around the corner to check on the bodies and Ghoul barrelling over, even though he had peeled off his shirt and Kobra was right in the middle of sticking a bandage on his collarbone, shoving a gun against the Drac’s forehead, and saying motherfucker, where did you take Party, tell me or I’ll fire, I swear, and then he fired anyway, fired until his raygun made sad low-battery noises when he clicked the trigger, and went back to the car, where he repeated the directions over and over as he ran his hand along Kobra’s spine.  
Straight, left, right, right, down the stairs to the basement, straight, straight, right. All Kobra wanted to do was sleep.

Jet had removed his eyepatch and was rubbing at the edges of his blackened eye socket. It hadn’t even been a full day since he’d lost it. Kobra still hadn’t seen what remained of the actual eye. “Are we going in?”

“Of course we’re going to go in.” Ghoul spat on the ground. His non-injured hand was holding onto Kobra’s left wrist. “Out of all the people to suggest leaving Party behind–”

“I wasn’t going to!” Jet threw one of his arms into the night air, let it drop. “Kobra read me the same act, fucking hell. I was more so asking if we want to go in, you know, right now.”

Kobra scoffed. “Won’t get any better if we wait.”

“Yeah, that…guy,” Ghoul said, motioning to the dead, maskless Drac on the floor who Kobra had definitely seen somewhere before, “said that most of his people were out trying to catch Chimp and the others. We wait, they come back. With Korse.”

“When did he say that?” Kobra asked, leaning into Ghoul’s hair.

Ghoul rolled to his feet without another word. Jet shrugged and put the eyepatch back on over his socket.

“We’ll get out,” Ghoul said to the sky. “The Witch still owes me.”

It was getting cold again; the air tasted like stars. It might have been sometime near Party’s birthday, Kobra thought, late in the fall, the kind of time that would make their moms talk about apple picking, about acorns lying on the ground in drifts.

Kobra knew Ghoul wasn’t sure, that none of them were sure. They took Ghoul’s hand, and they’d said all their _I love you_ s before they left the Diner, so they just said, “maybe,” because they weren’t going to jinx it. This time, when Jet sighed into the air, his breath did turn to mist.

The Killjoys put new batteries in their guns and walked back into the building that had killed them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading and I hope you stick around for the next chapters as I add more storylines!


End file.
